Beyond (Becoming) at The Boiler
Two nights of performances:
June 26 and 27, 2015. 7-9pm
Organized by London’s Royal College of Art
“Nothing in this world is constant except change and becoming.”
– Heraclitus
Not to rehearse, but to work truly live, in the moment of being and doing.
Where.
These nine young artists gathered to a new possibility in London some two years ago. Drawn from seven countries and three continents and brought together by study and subject. Led by Professor Nigel Rolfe, this is the founding class of the Performance Pathway in the Fine Art School at the Royal College Of Art, launched in 2013 as a new departure for subject and possibility.
Research.
To explore the potential that performance practice is sustainable at a high level of research and study in a world leading graduate school. To make new steps with enough significant meaning and depth that would enable not only our students’ work but also possibly performance work per se to be substantial and consequent.
Outcomes.
To be taken seriously is their achievement and success and to be strong and meaningful their reward. There is meaning and depth to outcomes achieved and future possibilities.
Working In / Working Out.
We are beyond the studio. The exciting prospect of bringing this first graduating group from London to New York to make work continues the Performance Pathways approach for our graduates to work out in the world. RCA Performance Pathway students, whilst learning with us at home, have worked throughout Europe—in the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden and just now at the 56th Venice Biennale—and farther still in China.
The Becoming Ontology
According to tradition, Heraclitus wrote a treatise about nature named “Perì phýseos”, “About Nature,” in which appears the famous aphorism “panta rhei [os potamòs]” translated literally as “the whole flows [as a river],” or figuratively as “everything flows, nothing stands still.” The concept of “becoming” in philosophy is connected with two others: movement and evolution, as becoming assumes a “changing to” and a “moving toward.” Becoming is the process or state of being coming about in time and space.
Beyond
Rosana Antoli comes to performance from a wide and well-articulated art practice making drawings that often investigate the self in society. Similar themes substantiate her live work with groups and on occasion her self.
Will Colley previously made active and destructive actions rooted in expressionist painting. Primarily these were material but have become now more in the body as site and what he does in the moment. There is a dirt meets clean undercurrent that when disturbed undermines social order.
Zejing Liu’s strong critical investigation probes race and trans migration. Inquiry through self and cultural grouping becomes a platform of in turn interrogating her audience and place in the world.
Karolina Magnusson-Murray made a long series of role play works juxtaposing fictive characterizations in a father daughter power play. Now she inhabits a powerful series of material and auditory performance actions that are transgressive meeting grounds of identity and failure.
Lou-Atessa Marcellin, has worked primarily with video, employing highly refined moving image synthesis of portraits, role and identity. Her performance works contend with issues of ecology, environment and the welfare of foods and of being.
Alicia Matthews works between questions of self-investigation and wider focus of social inequity and female identity. Her actions have become minimal, direct, and tough. Resonant in plain sight and toxic when material carries darker metaphors on the body.
Girolamo Marri places his work deliberately between the comedic failure of communication and the loss of language therein. This turns inwards and outwards both—between failure and loss—transformation as critique of life’s circumstance and possibly art itself.
Heather McCalden has a didactic practice between the photographic and the performative. The dialectic of critical mass and concepts in pictures and then highly articulate, dance rooted body actions—sensuous moves that haunt and confront.
Leon Platt is a polymath and programmer both. Using mind and grid to draw out in examination and research, to dig and then excavate the subversive depths of thought and logic. The surprise that with expressive direct performance actions he discovers what lies between body and material calamity are most profound in his complexity.